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When it comes to putting strange substances into your body in 2026, the sky’s the limit.First there were black-market Russian peptides — and now there are AI-generated viruses, which one startup claims has been used to successfully treat a bacterial infection.On Tuesday, the company called Radical Numerics published a technical paper on its website, explaining the process by which they trialed an AI-engineered viral treatment on a human subject. Targeting bacteria with special viruses isn’t new — it’s called “phage therapy,” and it involves deploying viruses that specifically target harmful microscopic organisms. But the hunt for viruses capable of locking…
Last week, the Sheriff’s Office in Stevens County, Minnesota made a startling Facebook post.“On October 14, 2026, at approximately 3:30pm, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call of foreign debris that was found in a cornfield in Scott Township,” it wrote. “Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”The post, which included a photo of…
Engagement farmers on TikTok are using AI to manipulate real arrest footage to show police officers kissing and groping arrestees being taken into custody.The deepfakes, which were discovered by Copyleaks, are grotesque. The AI-manipulated videos are based on actual footage of arrests — which appear to have originally been filmed for reality TV shows like TLC’s “D.U.I.” — but have been altered to depict law enforcement officers kissing and sexually touching real women, as well as a few real men, who were pulled over. The arrestees are often shown wearing handcuffs and being held near, in, or against police cruisers as…
Vibe coding is the act of telling an AI what you want to program and letting it write all the code for you. When it was first adopted, it was supposed to embody the sort of care-free optimism that was running in AI circles at the time, high off the possibilities of the tech. AI models had become so powerful that you could build an app using the same conversational language that you deploy while confiding in ChatGPT.But the “vibes” are different now. Programmers were quickly forced to grapple with the new reality that AI coding tools brought to their…
As Elon Musk tries to save face by claiming he’ll give every American child a chunk of SpaceX stock, here’s a chilling reminder of what he did that affected millions of children the second he had a whiff of federal power.In a new interview, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed a just-released four-hour look at the billionaire’s life titled “Musk,” discussed the staggering death toll of Musk’s cuts to USAID, calling it a “crime against humanity.”“There was an estimate that what [Musk] did by so suddenly cutting USAID would cost through disease and starvation as many as 14 million…
What does it take to get a hyperscale data center built this late into 2026? A whole army of contract laborers living on a prison barge, apparently.New reporting by Bloomberg revealed some bizarre details around the 30-megawatt data center being developed in Glomfjord, a small industrial village in Norway. Despite being heralded as a crown jewel of British data center company Nscale, the facility is at least six months behind schedule, with just 6.4 megawatts currently up and running.There are plenty of reasons for the setbacks. Bloomberg notes that costly and avoidable mistakes account for most of the delays, with…
As Meta was scrambling to release its Muse AI agent to the public earlier last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to insist that it was “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”On X-formerly-Twitter, the billionaire’s simple post soon had a correction tagged on via a community note, and for good reason: the AI agent is a font of untold privacy horrors.As Ars Technica reported today, security researchers found Muse is capable of exposing sensitive information on its users through web links generated via a “share” feature. Investigators at the cybersecurity firm Claroc recently uncovered a…
AI tools continue to automate more parts of our lives — and in turn, we become more reliant on them. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework, programmers ask Claude to churn out code, and now regular folks are getting a taste of AI agents with the launch of Meta’s cutesy personal assistant Muse.If the trend continues, where does it lead? Some experts who spoke to CBS News worry that we’re on a path to slowly ceding more control to AI models until we become empty, waiting vessels for a bot’s decisions. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: “gradual disempowerment.”…
Donald Trump’s second spin in the White House has been mired in high-profile incidents of graft and corruption, like the family’s tech stock profiteering, or the now-infamous TrumpCoin scandal. But the president’s latest grift goes far beyond personal wheeling and dealing, extending into the very machines some 174 million voting-aged Americans could use to cast their ballots.A bombshell investigation by ProPublica revealed that Trump’s cabinet goons overseeing the Department of Homeland Security instructed their underlings to procure a voting machine — and figure out how to hack it.Specifically, the ProPublica investigation found that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),…
Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity.As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dynamics, Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind is now hiring a team of “highly qualified physicists and nuclear engineers” for the role of “nuclear subject matter expert in the Chemical,…